Editing Sheila Rowbotham (section)

==Early life==
Rowbotham was born on 27 February 1943 in [[Leeds]] (in present-day [[West Yorkshire]]), the daughter of a salesman for an engineering company and an office clerk.{{sfn|Hughes-Warrington|2000|p=270}} From an early age, she was deeply interested in history.{{sfn|Hughes-Warrington|2000|p=270}} She has written that traditional [[political history]] "left her cold", but she credited Olga Wilkinson, one of her teachers, with encouraging her interest in [[social history]] by showing that history "belonged to the present, not to the history textbooks".{{sfn|Hughes-Warrington|2000|p=270}}

Rowbotham attended [[St Hilda's College, Oxford|St Hilda's College]] at [[University of Oxford|Oxford University]] and then the [[University of London]]. She began her working life as a teacher in [[comprehensive school]]s and institutes of higher or [[adult education]]. While attending St Hilda's College, Rowbotham found the syllabus with its heavy focus on political history to be of no interest to her.{{sfn|Hughes-Warrington|2000|p=270}} She has described herself at the time she started her studies at St Hilda's as "not at all left-wing" and a "mystical beatnik hippie-type", although she soon started to make contact with leftists, including fellow Oxford student [[Gareth Stedman Jones]], who became a professional historian. Rowbotham also met [[E.&nbsp;P. Thompson]] and [[Dorothy Thompson (historian)|Dorothy Thompson]] at this time, after a tutor recommended that she should visit them due to their interest in [[Chartism]] and the history of working-class movements: Rowbotham read the [[Galley proof|proofs]] of E.&nbsp;P. Thompson's ''[[The Making of the English Working Class]]'', which she has described as "like no other history book I'd read".<ref name=Jacobin>{{cite web |url=https://jacobinmag.com/2020/06/sheila-rowbotham-gabriel-winant-british-socialist-feminism |title=Sheila Rowbotham on E.&nbsp;P. Thompson, Feminism, and the 1960s |last=Press |first=Alex N.|author2=Gabriel Winant |date=29 June 2020|website=[[Jacobin (magazine)|Jacobin]]|access-date=30 June 2020}}</ref> Through her involvement in the [[Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament]] and various socialist circles, among them the [[Labour Party (UK)|Labour Party]]'s youth wing, the [[Labour Party Young Socialists|Young Socialists]], Rowbotham was introduced to [[Karl Marx]]'s ideas.{{sfn|Hughes-Warrington|2000|p=270}} Soon disenchanted with the direction of party politics, she immersed herself in a variety of left-wing campaigns, including writing for the [[Radical politics|radical political]] newspaper ''[[The Black Dwarf (newspaper)|Black Dwarf]]'', whose editorial board she also joined.<ref name=Jacobin />